What compact privilege is
A multistate license from your primary state of residence carries compact privilege — the authority to practice in other compact states without licensing separately in each. It only exists between states that are live in the Nurse Licensure Compact.
Practicing in Arkansas on privilege
Because Arkansas participates, an active multistate license lets you work in Arkansas — common for travel nurses and telehealth. Privilege follows the patient’s location and your home-state license staying active and multistate.
The law that governs this in Arkansas
Working in Arkansas on another state’s license is practice in Arkansas, so it is Arkansas’s own nurse practice act that defines what you may do and the Arkansas State Board of Nursing that applies it. That act is Arkansas nursing licensure law (Arkansas State Board of Nursing).
The compact itself is separate law. Arkansas adopted it at Ark. Code Ann. §§ 17-87-601 to 17-87-604 (Nurse Practice Act, subch. 6 — Nurse Licensure Compact), which is what allows a multistate license issued elsewhere to reach Arkansas at all — the practice act still decides what you may do once it does.
Read from the Arkansas Department of Health’s own compiled Nurse Practice Act, which is published split by subchapter — subchapter 6 IS the compact, and contains exactly these four sections. The board’s compact page is not the source: it describes the 1999 original and the 2017 replacement in prose and cites no code section at all. Arkansas ran the original compact from 2000 and adopted the enhanced one in 2017, so an Arkansas citation predating that changeover is describing superseded law.
Confirm before you rely on it
License status changes and the compact evolves. Confirm your own license type on Nursys and check Arkansas’s current rules with the Arkansas State Board of Nursing. CompactStates.com is an independent guide, not a licensing authority.
Since when has a compact license worked in Arkansas?
Nurses holding another state’s multistate license have been able to practice in Arkansas since January 19, 2018. It has been a member long enough that most guidance you find will be accurate on this point.
Where a Arkansas multistate license reaches
If your Arkansas license is multistate — not every Arkansas license is — it carries privilege into these 39 jurisdictions, because each one currently issues and honours multistate licenses. It reaches nowhere else, and a non-compact state needs its own license by endorsement.
Two conditions sit underneath this list and neither is visible on it. Your primary state of residence must actually be Arkansas — privilege follows residence, not where the license was issued. And the license itself must be multistate rather than single-state, which is a fact about your record that only verification can settle.
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